Nigeria officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a sovereign country in West Africa bordering Niger in the north, Chad in the northeast, Cameroon in the east, and Benin in the west. Its southern coast is on the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a federal republic comprising 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, where the capital, Abuja, is located. Lagos is the most populous city in the country and the African continent, as well as one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.
Nigeria has been home to several indigenous pre-colonial states and kingdoms since the second millennium BC, with the Nok Civilization having been the first time the country had been unified internally in the 15th Century B.C. The modern state originated with British colonialization in the 19th century, taking its present territorial shape with the merging of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1914 by Lord Frederick Lugard. The British set up administrative and legal structures while practicing indirect rule through traditional chiefdoms. Nigeria became a formally independent federation on October 1, 1960. It experienced a civil war from 1967 to 1970, followed by a succession of democratically-elected civilian governments and military dictatorships, until achieving a stable democracy in 1999; the 2015 presidential election was the first time an incumbent president had lost re-election.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the seventh most populous country in the world, with an estimated 206 million inhabitants as of late 2019. It has the third-largest youth population in the world, after India and China, with nearly half its population under the age of eighteen.[18][19] Nigeria’s economy is the largest in Africa and the 24th largest in the world, worth almost $450 billion and $1 trillion in terms of nominal GDP and purchasing power parity, respectively.Nigeria is often referred to as the “Giant of Africa”, owing to its large population and economy, and is also considered to be an emerging market by the World Bank;it has been identified as a regional power on the African continent, a middle power in international affairs, and has also been identified as an emerging global power.However, its Human Development Index ranks 158th in the world, and the country is classified as a lower middle-income economy, with a gross national income per capita between $1,026 and $3,986.
Nigeria–Turkey relations
Diplomatic relations at the legation level were established in 1960 and then to the rank of ambassador in 1958. Turkey opened an embassy in Lagos, then capital of Nigeria in 1962. Turkish embassy moved to Abuja in 2001 after Nigeria’s proclamation of Abuja as the new capital.
Turkey and Nigeria were pro-Western on most issues but Nigeria mainly sided with the Arab World against Israel,which was Turkey’s closest ally in the Middle East at the time.
Until Nigerian Civil War, Nigeria and Turkey had very strong relations. This strong relationship became much weaker after the coup and Nigerian Civil Warwhen Turkey took a position of neutrality in Nigerian Civil War and refused to sell arms to the federation. The relationship improved in the early 1990s through close cooperation in foreign policy.
The two countries cooperated during the Gulf crisis that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Both countries kept a low profile by being an active supporter of UN policy and declining to send troops to engage in the Persian Gulf.
